Not so great balls of fire

Ninety-year-old Frederic Sargent was on the ground floor of what was arguably the national media’s initiation into the UFO phenomenon. “To me, it was criminal the way they reported it,” he says from the study of his home in Sarasota. “I was just trying to report it accurately.”

Frederic Sargent chronicled the 415th Night Fighter Squadron’s encounters with ‘foo fighters’ near the end of World War II/CREDIT: Kathryn Brass

The mystery was a small blurb in his long professional life, which produced three books. One — Rural Environmental Planning for Sustainable Communities — he co-authored in 1976. Another, The Civil Rights Revolution: Events and Leaders 1955-1968, was a bit more personal. A social activist at Texas A&M in the 1950s, Sargent lost his faculty position for trying to integrate churches in the College Station community. He left the U.S. for Canada for a couple of years before finishing his academic career at the University of Vermont.

Sargent was also a flight mechanic for one of the most elite American units in WW2 — the 415th Night Fighter Squadron. It was also one of the most overlooked. Years later, upon reviewing a coffeetable book on Air Force history, he could find no mention of the 415th. “I’m sure it was because we were flying British planes,” he says.

Operating out of French airstrips in Dijon and Ochey, the 415th flew heavy twin-engine Bristol Beaufighters assigned to obliterate whatever moved behind German lines after sundown — convoys, trains, ships, aircraft, you name it. Among Sargent’s duties were keeping the generator and field lights running when the pilots returned from their missions. He was constantly chatting with the pilots.

That’s why the Jan. 15, 1945, issue of Time magazine took him by surprise. In introducing the world to the “Foo Fighter” phenomenon, Time reported American pilots were encountering and being shadowed by “strange balls of fire.” The weekly offered “St. Elmo’s fire, a reddish brushlike discharge of atmospheric electricity” as a possible explanation. Sargent counters with a derisive laugh.

“Well, if you’re a reporter, you’ve got to come up with some kind of answer, don’t you?” he asks. “You’ve gotta explain it somehow, right?”

The pilots weren’t describing balls of fire. From November 1944 to April 1945, they were reporting incandescent spherical lights of various colors — reds and greens and oranges — playing cat-and-mouse games from the deck all the way into the clouds at 13,000 feet. They moved in tandem and erratically, in groups of half a dozen and in isolation, hovering in fixed positions or blazing along at speeds and angles that made Allied war machinery look stupid.

A 415th radar operator, Lt. Don Meiers, coined the term “foo fighters” from a syndicated “Smokey Stover” comic strip. Which was ironic, given how the UFOs rarely showed up on radar screens in the air or on the ground. On April 23, the pilot of a brand new bird — the P-61 Black Widow, loaded to the gills with onboard radar — spotted four foo fighter lights arrayed in a square formation near the Rhine River. The lights vanished upon being approached, left no radar signature. That was the last foo fighter report in the 415th records.

Sargent never figured out how Time scored the story. But after Germany surrendered, unit commander Maj. Harold Augspurger directed Sargent to write the group’s history and gave him access to all reports and records. The book — 415th Night Fighter Squadron, which includes a mention of the foo fighters — was published in hardback in 1946.

Sargent has had less success in finding somebody to publish his 17-page, double-spaced retrospective “Foo Fighters of the 415th,” which he wrote in 2006. He’s no closer to solving the mystery than he was in 1945, except that he’s been intrigued by latter-day reports and rumors of recovered Nazi aeronautics weaponry at the end of the war. Whatever else the foo fighters may have represented, Sargent argues radar-evading stealth shielding had to be in the mix.

“I think so much of this stuff was kept secret because they realized the necessity of developing a stealth fighter and keeping it secret from the Russians,” Sargent says.

Decades later, in the waning years of the Cold War, the 415th Night Fighter Squadron was reconstituted into the 94th Fighter Wing at Holloman AFB, N.M. It was the first fighter group configured with stealth technology.